Welcome! Everyone asks me about the aviator glasses. I mean, they were prescription, but they were also about protection. The bigger the better. The hair, too. But I don't want anything to come between us tonight. Because here's the good news—We're all in this room together and not alone on our computers or cell phones! Humans are communal animals—we're meant to be sitting around campfires telling our stories—learning from each other—we've been doing it for millennia.— Christine' Lahti's Gloria using the famous surface aspects of her persona to let us see the vulnerability beneath the powerful, achieving woman whose five-decades personal life and career we'll be part of for the next couple of hours.

Christine Lahti projected and on stage with the Ensemble (Photo: Joan Marcus

Diane Paulus has staged Emily Mann's wonderful play about the long and influential life of Gloria Steinem to create an experience that's more like having a conversation than watching a play. With an assist from set designer Amy Rubin, Paulus has transformed the Daryl Roth Theater into a giant parlor, with the audience seated all around the stage.

Like Ms. Steinem's own upper East Side apartment the floors are covered with Persian rugs. The props consists of a few colorfully upholstered hassocks which will be put to multiple uses as we move through the five decades of Steinem's life. The comfortably Kilim cushioned seats encircling the stage support this sense of visiting Ms. Steinem for a conversation about the battles women have fought over the decades — and are fighting more intensely than ever.

Mann's script is structured into an approximately 90-minute act consisting of three parts, each of which introduces us to another decade— with the third part taking us from the 80s to the post Trump Women's March of 2017. After just a brief pause, there's second act that's essentially a talk-back with variously invited guests to host the audience's active participation in this play-cum-talking circle conversation. At my performance I had the great good luck to have the real Gloria Steinem as the host of that segment.

There's a lot of ground to cover in Steinem's long journey from Toledo, Ohio to Smith College, to New York. It was not until she arrived their to become a journalists that the roadblocks to that ambition first made her aware that women needed a movement.

Naturally, there's a replay of her famous undercover stint as a Playboy Bunny, and the article about it that finally freed her from the female ghetto of writing strictly on spec about women's interest subjects like beauty, fashion, housekeeping and romance. We learn that this story actually happened when as a free-lancer at Show Magazine she heard the editors wondering whether they should cover the about to open Playboy club and popped up with "Why don't we ask Dorothy Parker to go undercover as a Bunny?" Her joke turned into an assignment she didn't want but took because she needed the money to pay her rent. The time spent on the Bunny business isn't just funny but depressingly relevant which is why Lahti-Gloria stops the music long enough to voice her amazement that a new Playboy Club opened here in NY, 30 years after Hefner himself declared the Bunny "a symbol of the past?"

Christine Lahti, who last distinguished herself in the revival of one of Suzann-Lori Park's Red Letter Plays (review) not only convincingly inhabits the titular role but is a reasonably convincing Steinem look-alike.

Ms. Mann's script is stuffed with countless other both humorous and moving defining moments in Steinem's personal and professional life, and with dozens of characters for Lahti's Gloria to effectively share with us. That's where the multi-generational, diverse ensemble and Elaine J. McCarthy's projected replays of historic events and figures come into play. Under Ms. Paulus's adept direction, an event is often presented simultaneously on stage and in the scene projected on the panels at the rear of two of the four seating sections.

The program listings for the six ensemble members don't include references to their roles. That's because this terrifically versatile sextet acts as a chorus to echo and expand on Gloria's dialogue, but take turns as the characters in the more detailed recollections.
Their popping up in the aisles as well as on stage to move the props around as well as act does get a bit busy at times.

Joanna Glushak is heart-wrenching as Steinem's mother a talented woman who never fulfilled her potential because she married unwisely, and stuck to that marriage. It's her assuring her daughter that she's not sorry because "if I'd left, you'd never have been born" that has propelled Gloria to live the "unlived life" of her mother. Glushak gets to shift to a more accomplished and amusing character, as the colorful, outspoken former Democratic Congresswoman Bella Abzug.

While I seem to be singling out Glushak, her colleagues all have their standout scenes.
Their quick-as-a-wink role switches are greatly abetted Jessica Jahn's costumes. In fact, the entire production is enriched by the work of the all female design team.

Since the audience at my performance ran the age gamut and included quite lot of men. It will be an intriguing first meet-up for those too young to have voted for New York Congresswoman Bella Abzug or to know African-American activist Angela Davis and Phyllis Schlafly, a forerunner to the Evangelical women who voted for Donald Trump.

Obviously not everything can be fully explored in less than two hours. But then Steinem's books are still available in whatever your preferred reading format.
While some of the harrowing accounts of pre-Roe V. Wade abortion experiences are depressingly timely, Lahti's Gloria sees the can-do response to the unprecedented crisis we currently live in as a cause for her continued optimism. After all, as she puts it "Social justice movements start with people sitting in a circle" as they do at the Daryl Roth Theater.

But to validate Ms. Steinem's optimism after you leave that circle you'll need to follow it up by going out to vote, perhaps run for office yourself, or work for someone who does.